Zoraptor

It's weekly here too- and delayed, which is kind of weird considering how comparatively little TV they have to show with covid delaying so much stuff. Schedule is determined by whoever bought the show locally.

The weird laptop thing was a bit later, the gist is that Hunter Biden was stupid or greedy enough to take a position on the Board of a Ukrainian gas company (Burisma) which he had no qualifications to hold except for his father being VP. The prosecutor in charge of corruption investigations then got fired. Allegation is that Biden (sr) got that prosecutor fired to protect his son. There really isn't any evidence to support that, the prosecutor almost certainly got fired for being generally useless with the timing being coincidental. Hunter Biden taking that position was a really bad look though, with the absolutely best possible face put on it he was incredibly- unbelievably- naive. Then again, Trumpists can hardly throw about accusations of filial graft without appearing mildly hypocritical. Russiagate is the belief that 'Russia stole the election for Trump' was a big hoax embiggened by media as a way to deligitimise Trump. Effectively it's the reverse position from "Russia stole the election, Hillary would have won in a landslide without their interference". Neither position is exactly rooted in reality, just in political tribalism. Dunno about AOC, but I thought it was hilarious that her (analogue's) power in 'The Boys' was to cause people's heads to blow up, since that's her metaphorical power here as well.

We have a specific name for that sort of statement here, the 'Smashed Avocado fallacy': "if people just stopped buying smashed avocados for breakfast they'd soon save enough to buy a house" was a near literal quote from someone defending the housing crisis. ie, despite house price appreciation at twice the median wage annually, the problem is people buying luxuries- so if people just stopped paying a mythical $20 a day for a café breakfast they'd be able to afford their own slice of paradise. Complete fiction of course, that saving wouldn't even cover appreciation on the deposit, and would be, heh, eaten up as annual rent increases outstrip it too. It doesn't stand the most basic scrutiny, and is just victim blaming. To put it in perspective, my parents worked 40 years and the thing that made them 'millionaires' was not that work, but buying a house for $16000 in 1980 instead of renting. They got 40,000$ average return per year, untaxed, every year, from that decision. Not really something someone can do in 2021 though.

Go home forum software, you're drunk.

If there's an enormous crash the shareholders lose their value anyway. The idea would be to skip the step where everything goes bust seen in the Great Depression and go straight to the governmental programs that got countries out of that rut. Also, with a more balanced model you can do things like have national superannuation programs that don't rely on sharemarket speculation for their funding. That's pretty important because- much like housing speculation here- you're in a situation where continual unsustainable sharemarket appreciation is so fundamentally underpinning the economy that anything other than that growth is a massive problem, leading to even more artificial props holding it up. With that appreciation benefiting one very small group of people massively, a somewhat larger group somewhat, but for the majority it's of no benefit, at very best. For many it's a big net loss, like everyone here who ends up seeing houses appreciate 20%, rents appreciate 20%, and their wages so ability to get on the property ladder and pay their rents in the meantime appreciate... 2%. So the median person on ~70k is watching house prices rise by 2x their entire annual wage before tax, with the people doing the buying paying... 1% interest. And then, the government steps in to subsidise rents, giving the people buying the houses not just 20% government mediated capital appreciation, but 20% subsidised rent appreciation too, paid for by the guy making 70k a year. And, of course, those rent payments and the increased equity are then reinvested into... more housing subsidised housing purchases. Oddly enough, there are... not many (2) MPs who don't own property and thus don't benefit personally from the money merry go round. Same in the US, just different sectors and numbers. And there, I managed to work corruption in New Zealand in somewhat relevantly to a topic. Nationalisation is not an idea I agree with in most cases but it is also not without merit. The 2008 bail outs, after all, were effectively government(s) giving vast amounts of money to corporations to prop them up. In some cases getting equity in return, but in most it was the taxpayer propping them up with no direct return at all. Same with the current crop of covid related bail outs and programs. Those programs all benefited the shareholder class with massive disproportion, which is one of the reasons there's a lot of support for making nation wide pay outs this time. And there has been very little to no actual movement on the problem of 'too big to fail', except more and more entities joining that list and getting the benefits of privatised profits and nationalised liabilities.

Oh, it is. New Zealand has almost limitless capacity to decide that something that is corruption elsewhere isn't corruption, here, because we simply don't have corruption. That, and international reputation based on that self delusion is why we so consistently end up #1.

'Uncontrollable' might be slightly hyperbolic, but I was pressed for time. It's also, frankly, a bit off topic. What I get the shall we say barely controllable urge to do is point out that the concept of a perception index is deeply flawed, since what it's really measuring is (1) the amount to which a surveyed population deludes itself, and (2) what the international stereotype of that country is; not just how much corruption there actually is.

Every time I see this cited I get an uncontrollable urge to reply with obama_awards_obama.jpg

Biden's also (re)appointing a bunch of guys who quit over Turkey attacking the Kurds in Syria like Brett McGurk, and appeasers like Jim Jeffrey are gone or going. Wouldn't expect anything significant to change in practice though in terms of US-Turkey itself, just for Turkey to be less aggressive in general and there to be less events that run counter to US geopolitical goals sponsored by Turkey. Well, until Erdogan needs a distraction from an imploding economy or a popularity boost before an election.

It's not a totally stupid misconception. Good quality masks (N95/ FFP2) do protect the wearer, they're just not what the public is wearing. But back when everyone was talking about PPE being in short supply it would have been very easy to pick up the belief that all face masks were intended to protect the wearer, and the press in general has often been... casual when it comes to being accurate about details and differences.

Availability update: as of yesterday we have 19 (!) different models of RX6000 card in stock here, including reference 6900XT at MSRP + $35. Going by the continuing comments in the US and Europe we must be getting half the global supply of CPUs/ GPUs sent here for some reason.

It does come from a well regarded video reviewer though. Trouble with any news about 3080Ti is that none of it is verified including its practical existence, it's all leaks one way or the other.

We have had very few cases which makes finding a link relatively easy, and for a couple the only link to an infected person was a bus trip both took (example case, press report). IIRC in that case they weren't even on the bus at the same time, but about ten minutes apart which is why it took more time to find.

HoonDing == oby. Though oby would have somehow contrived to find an AK variant with a stars&stripe paintjob.

Despite having very few cases overall we've had a few here where the only link is public transport (buses specifically). Far more from other causes like being family members or workmates, but those are also a lot easier to contain. China's vaccine is fine, at least for efficiency. The Brazil study is being- probably deliberately- misinterpreted, often by those who should know better*. The issue is similar to one there was a brief discussion about a few pages ago about what the efficacy of a vaccine means, practically, and the difference between SARS-CoV2 and Covid19. Most vaccines aren't of the smallpox type eradication sort. Despite everyone talking about 'immunity' as a shorthand that's not what they're talking about when it comes to how well the vaccine works. In part because that isn't really how the human immune system works. The- pretty much fake news- headlines about China's vaccine having a ~50% effectiveness are an example. It's 50% effective, if you include asymptomatic and very mild infections. Sounds kind of bad, however, it's 100% effective against severe covid19. You can still be infected by SARS-CoV2 post vaccination, but you won't get severe covid19 from it, and your chances of getting covid19 at all are reduced ~80%. It's reduced the chances of getting infected, and the effects of the infection. To illustrate the point, the highly effective Pfizer vaccine's efficacy drops precipitously if you do the analysis the same way that was done to the sinapharm one, ie include everyone reporting mild symptoms and those with positive PCR but no symptoms. Indeed, it actually has a worse efficiency than sinapharm in that case. It's irrelevant in both cases, because an infection that causes minimal harm might as well not exist. 'Covid19' defines a set of symptoms caused by the SC2 virus, severe enough to kill. If you don't/ didn't have the symptoms you don't have the disease, what you have is another coronavirus contributing to the mix of various viruses that causes the 'common cold'. *I made fun previous of the BBC for their utterly partisan coverage of Sputnik vs AZOxford compared to how the results turned out and they're now repeating the 50% effective claim acritically as well. Useless coverage is part of the reason we end up with antivaxxers, and by and large the coverage has been a masterclass in Western Exceptionalism instead- indeed, as mentioned yesterday, the Chinese vaccine being indemnified is used to build suspicion without mentioning the context that the western vaccines are indemnified in the same way too.

The Chinese vaccine isn't stolen, certainly not off a big name/ leading contender at least. It's an inactivated virus vaccine unlike the others. As a consequence of that it's not particularly effective- comparatively, it's still effective enough. It's entirely possible that he actually was misquoted or misquoting though, as it reads more like a list of ailments that could possibly have been related to the vaccine, rather than those that definitely were. A similar example would be the AZOxford trial being delayed when a guy got a rare nerve disease while on it. Some of the stuff in the article is definite sino bashing too, indemnity for the producer against being sued for side effects has been generally applied throughout the world, since it's accepted that they're rushed and not had the usual length/ depth of trial (eg, for Pfizer in the UK). The allegation was that Russia was behind the hacking. Funny timing, as some of the data hacked got released today. I'd be somewhat amused if it was SVR/ FSB/ Spetzvyaz; stereotypical anime waifu avatar behind which hides a stereotypical Russian KGB goon.

For me, got the number from BBC specifically, prior to the vote. House Majority Leader Steny (?) also said up to 20 expected to cross the floor. Not sure where Bruce got it from but he mentioned the same number too, last page.

Don't think there's any prospect of them getting the 2/3 majority needed for a removal now, they'd need 7 more people to cross the floor in the 100 member Senate than they got in the ~400 member House. Given that it's very likely to be deferred until later.

Impeachment passed, but with a lot less cross party support (10 Republicans) than speculated. Not exactly bipartisan and not a great sign for those wanting an out and out removal in the Senate.

Same guy, same vaccine. BioNTech research, but (mainly) Pfizer production, and distribution iirc. Presumably the Moderna vaccine could be similarly programmed too, as it's also a mRNA one.

Well yeah, ideally they should have talked about it earlier, I'm just saying why they didn't. Trump is famous and everyone knows- there's a formal public explanation- why he was banned. That's not the case for the vast majority of other bannings. (It's a lot more difficult to do vetting for the 'little people' and checking why they were banned. Indeed, people going elsewhere to whine about being banned on SM followed by finding out that that ban was perfectly justified is a bit of s stereotype for good reason. Obviously we both know there are legitimate complaints, but "actually, [one person in article] was banned for sending unsolicited dong pics to underage girls via PM, not what they claimed" will be an inevitable response to such articles, from SM companies) If you're in the US, rest of the world appears left wing. If you're in the rest of the world, US appears right wing. It comes up a lot obviously, but 'left wing' things like single payer healthcare are near universal in developed countries, outside the US, and the equivalent of most right wing parties outside the US are the Democrats, not the Republicans.

That's a "some researchers are worried, some think it's not a worry" situation. There's been a reinfection case with e484k, but there have been reinfections with other strains too, the human immune system isn't perfect in the first place. The concensus seems to be that it may reduce effectiveness a bit, but that's all. It's more the implication from it that there could be mutations that reduce immunity a lot that is the issue. That's the good thing about mRNA vaccines though, they're effectively reprogrammable. Stick a new spike protein sequence in to get new mRNA and a new vaccine in theoretically a few days (Pfizer guy said production could be switched within two weeks). A new vaccine at $40 per immunity, but then it being programmable is partly why it's so expensive.

Not exactly unexpected though. They've already got a lot of announced or implied products that they simply cannot make at the moment due to capacity issues, and it's too early for talk about Zen4 or RDNA3. Some of the other things they could have talked about like non X desktop Ryzen would be interesting for consumers, but pointless for AMD. They're already selling every 5600X produced, there's no point having a 5600 non X that costs the same to make but sells for less and won't increase sales. Similarly, not much point talking about 5000 series threadripper when they can sell the same chiplet for more as Epyc, and 3000 series already brutally murders Intel's offerings in HEDT. Bad timing for a keynote address, really. We've been a bit spoiled by AMD's meme presentations in the past couple of years, they can't have bar graphs using 3x 10m screens to show performance every time.

Nothing much Swan could have done more, and he was always meant to be an interim CEO. It certainly wasn't his MBA style background that gave Intel its recent troubles. Having said that, iirc while Krzanich had a technical/ engineering degree he went straight from that into management and never did 'proper' engineering.

While that may be somewhat of a facetious suggestion I at least literally couldn't. It would take me 50 years- yep, literally- to download even Parler's relatively puny 70 TB with my data cap. At least by that time 70 TB of storage for the data would be cheap hopefully, but the relevance would certainly be gone. There's been plenty of talk about it. But it's like anything, it will only get actual attention when it happens to someone 'important'. Kim and Kanye get burgled, big news. You or I get burgled, lucky if the police turn up.